Kelsey Klotz, "Dave Brubeck and the Performance of Whiteness" (Oxford UP, 2023)

Jan 5, 2026

Kelsey Klotz, a Lecturer of music and assistant dean for inclusive excellence at UNC Charlotte, dives into the complex legacy of jazz icon Dave Brubeck. She explores how Brubeck's performances intersected with the dynamics of mid-century whiteness. Klotz discusses the racialization of cool jazz, the nuances of Brubeck's respectability politics, and the impact of his integrated quartet during a tense Southern tour. Through her research, she highlights the ongoing conversation about race, privilege, and identity in American music.

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INSIGHT

Whiteness As Performance

Whiteness operates as a set of performative behaviors that circulate and become habitual across institutions and individuals.
Dave Brubeck exemplifies a "good white person" whose sincere acts still get mediated by white supremacist structures.

INSIGHT

Critical Language Creates Racial Sound

Critics racialized musical traits by assigning European-classical terms like fugue and counterpoint to white players.
That language framed Brubeck's music as intellectual while coding Black jazz as natural, swinging, and hot.

INSIGHT

Swing As A Gatekeeping Tool

"Swing" became an ineffable gatekeeping label tied to racialized authenticity in jazz criticism.
Critics used claims that Brubeck "didn't swing" to discredit him amid anxieties about his rapid fame.

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How can we—jazz fans, musicians, writers, and historians—understand the legacy and impact of a musician like Dave Brubeck? It is undeniable that Brubeck leveraged his fame as a jazz musician and status as a composer for social justice causes, and in doing so, held to a belief system that, during the civil rights movement, modeled a progressive approach to race and race relations. It is also true that it took Brubeck, like others, some time to understand the full spectrum of racial power dynamics at play in post-WWII, early Cold War, and civil rights-era America.

Dave Brubeck and the Performance of Whiteness (Oxford UP, 2023) uses Brubeck's performances of whiteness across his professional, private, and political lives as a starting point to understand the ways in which whiteness, privilege, and white supremacy more fully manifested in mid-century America. How is whiteness performed and re-performed? How do particular traits become inscribed with whiteness, and further, how do those traits, now racialized in a listener's mind, filter the sounds a listener hears? To what extent was Brubeck's whiteness made by others? How did audiences and critics use Brubeck to craft their own identities centered in whiteness? Drawing on archival records, recordings, and previously conducted interviews, Dave Brubeck and the Performance of Whiteness listens closely for the complex and shifting frames of mid-century whiteness, and how they shaped the experiences of Brubeck's critics, audiences, and Brubeck himself. Throughout, author Kelsey Klotz asks what happens when a musician tries to intervene, using his privilege as a tool with which to disrupt structures of white supremacy, even as whiteness continues to retain its hold on its beneficiaries.

Nathan Smith is a PhD Student in Music Theory at Yale University (nathan.smith@yale.edu).

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